The recent advances in automation technology, robotics in particular, have sparked a heated debate over the future of labor and human society at large. The ongoing process of robotization may engender profound impacts on various segments of the labor market. Given the far-reaching implications of robots, it is thus very important to understand the scale and scope of robot use and characteristics of robot users. However, the main challenge is the limited availability of robot data at the microeconomic level (Raj and Seamans, 2018). Due to the data constraint, the bulk of the existing literature relies on cross-country industry-level data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). The lack of micro-level robot data makes it difficult to paint a comprehensive picture of robotization in industrial settings, and perhaps more importantly, to assess how within-industry firm level heterogeneity manifests itself in robot use and adoption.

Benmir, Jaccard, and Vermandel (2023, BJV) seek to answer the following set of topical and important research questions: (i) How should monetary policy be conducted during a pandemic?, (ii) How do health considerations affect the conduct of monetary policy?, and (iii) How does the presence of contagion risk affect the main building blocks of the New Keynesian model?